Miscellanea: Color Me Absurd-ed

“No man has seen God at any time (1 John 4:12) He is a thing invisible; not with the eye but with the heart must He be sought. But just as if we wished to see the sun, we should purge the eye of the body; wishing to see God, let us purge the eye by which God can be seen. Where is this eye? Hear the Gospel: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Matthew 5:8). But let no man imagine God to himself according to the lust of his eyes. For so he makes unto himself either a huge form, or a certain incalculable magnitude which, like the light which he sees with the bodily eyes, he makes extend through all directions; field after field of space he gives it all the bigness he can; or, he represents to himself like as it were an old man of venerable form. None of these things do you imagine. There is something you may imagine, if you would see God; God is love. What sort of face has love? What form has it? What stature? What feet? What hands has it? No man can say. And yet it has feet, for these carry men to church: it has hands; for these reach forth to the poor: it has eyes; for thereby we consider the needy: Blessed is the man, it is said, who considers the needy and the poor. It has ears, of which the Lord says, He that has ears to hear let him hear (Luke 8:8). These are not members distinct by place, but with the understanding he that has love sees the whole at once.” (St. Augustine, Homily 7 on the First Epistle of John)

There is a certain unspoken covenant among the rebels against “the modern West”, ranging from Pascal to Dostoyevski and Nietzsche; from Camus and cultural revolutionaries of the Sixties to contemporary academic mainstream. Being unspoken and rarely, if ever, addressed one cannot help but suspect a certain blind spot at work there; something that is neglected in silence and left to fester in the darkness; a little, ugly, inconsistency in the “great truth”: the truth of declaring human intellect to be the scourge upon the history.

One who thinks – “intellectualizes” – so the story goes, does not love. “Heart has its own reasons of which reason knows nothing”, as Pascal had famously put it – and the ability, or even desire, to approach the truth in the intellectual sense, except abandoning the intellect altogether, is being condemned as “rationalization”.

You can make two plus two, but if you’re talking about anything outside of arithmetic don’t you dare deny that it most likely equals five, as Dostoyevski’s thinker from under the floor boards had put it.

If you are to be a real human being – a free man – this is not only possible but also necessary.

Without this freedom – the freedom unto absurd – there’s no freedom at all …

All pathos aside, this is simply a world-class bullshit.

And “world-class” is meant quite literary, because this kind of thinking (intellectual?) is more or less prevalent among literary and religious (literary religious or religiously literary?) intellectuals of our day and age.

If you don’t believe your humble narrator – check out the dominant discourse or, better, inquire where we get this term from and, as will inevitably occur, you’ll realize that not only heart, but also rectum can reason quite autonomously from tyrannical intellect.

Well, cardio-rectal intellectuality is of no interest to us here, so let’s be done with it, helped by the passage from the pure hearted Saint and accomplished Dark Ages intellectual we quoted above.

St. Augustine points out two things as one in no uncertain terms: the purity of heart and purity of intellect are one and the same power – the power of love and understanding, undividedly distinct. Both comprise that one act required to see the “whole at once”.

If God is love, he is invisible because love has no visible face yet in practicing the understanding with the pure heart, one is inevitably brought before it – the like perceives the like, as was well known in those times.

The whole seen at once through the act of intellect/heart is one in many or many in one – one reality that cannot be divided, yet is understood in discernment as something one hears and understands, craves as the final aim of his actions and perceives as law bearing the quite similar necessity to arithmetically correct sum of two plus two.

What Augustine sees as an error is precisely the thing that was widely cherished in modernity as the refuge from the scorching light of heartless intellect, i.e. imagination.

He provides us with an example of intellectual imagination of sorts where intellect devoid of reality – i.e. intellect not in touch with what it thinks but acting “according to the lust of (…) eyes” – creates the images of what should be unimaginable precisely because it is the most comprehensible. Therefore, people make mistake imagining God as an infinite magnitude or venerable old man, replacing the thought with the image fashioned from image-building faculty that mediates between the mind and the senses.

This always happens when man is not up to the task posed by his intellect. Letting go of images is not just a lofty prerequisite for mental prayer or mystical state reserved for secluded monks but is in the very nature of intellect itself. Although it is not so powerful to accomplish this in toto and let us see the invisible indivisibly it is quite well disposed to discern it through the visible as one in many and many in one. St. Augustine here demonstrates this with astonishing ease as an everyday occurrence – a simple adherence to the truth of Christian faith which is in turn the truth of love towards fellow men – those, one might say, who are closest and the least mysterious to us.

This is obviously not some kind of system building dialectics, supposedly embedded at the rotten heart of the Western thought, but learned ignorance of intellect whose comprehension is, by “seeing all at once”, the unifying act of love.

This kind of thinking is equally under attack from what we call “scientism”, which denies us approach to anything that cannot be reduced to materially based propositions, and the absurd freedom which denies any relevance of intellect to matters that concern us the most; posthumanism can very well have its mirror image in subhumanism – one seeks to transcend the limits by totally imposing the materiality that is to be alchemically transmuted into “new man” while other craves to accomplish this by erasing them all together; one amounts to technological indifference, the other to the indifference of savagery.

One should be wary of the minds that crave divisions, and divisions always tend to go in plural, multiplying into infinity.

To say that intellect is essentially the power of constraint that ultimately constrains even God Himself into some kind of mathematical formula is to be a liar of a peculiar, very modern and very fashionable, kind, because what the intellect constrains in its action is only man’s finite human self.

The cry of absurd freedom has nothing to do with God but only with crier himself, because constraint of the civilization he feels is a constraint on his own freedom to be what he wills to be; it is the will to unrestrained possibility that wants to erase all limits imposed by what is actual.

Nothing of a sort is at work in St. Augustine’s sermon.

The idea that “my” constraints are what should be addressed, moreover that straying of science and civilization from God is necessarily mediated through what “I” experience as constraint is so far from those Dark Ages luminaries that one has a distinct impression that it never really occurred to them.

Might it be that they were so busy watching their world actually fall apart that they never got around to feel constrained by it?

Was St. Augustine’s experience of the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire so underwhelming that he hasn’t even noticed it while praying on his death bed in the besieged Hippo for his flock and his immortal soul, as opposed to Albert Camus who heroically contemplated absurdity of all history, including St. Augustine himself, while sunbathing on the Algerian beaches during the early years of WWII?

I tend to answer in the negative.

I also answer in the negative that people of this sort came to exist in the civilizational decline because of some error made by anyone older than their grand-grand fathers.

From the Parmenides onwards anyone who wants to know what it means to think can know it.

To project one’s own failings into distant past is to attempt to kill the past by turning it into present.

All movements with ‘neo-‘ prefix should therefore be automatically suspect because this is most likely what they are aiming at. You can be a revolutionary seeking past utopias just as well as seeking future ones, as was the inclination in modernity.

Could postmodernity be a play pen precisely for such kind of nihilism that doesn’t attempt to cut off the past by rejecting it but by appropriating it?

We’ll leave the question open but let us note: in some postmodern “neo-traditionalist”, “neo-existentialist”, “neo-slavophile” or neo-whatever utopia, probably dreamed of by someone somewhere as you read these lines, both those who are able to affirm that two plus two equals five and that love empowers the intellect to comprehend distinctly undivided nature of its true object are poised to be two faces of the one and the same enemy – the truth.

And truth is not the scourge of history but rather of human vanity, whichever form it appropriates.

15 Responses

Interesting topic, no doubt, but I have some reservations about your overall analysis of this phenomenon.
Not that what you say is untrue- on condition we mean by intellect what the greeks meant by nous and the hebrews, egyptians and all near East and Mesopotamian civilizations by heart.

However, this phenomenon you describe as a re-action to the modern west deserves a closer consideration as to the initial action that brought it about. Namely, these authors that you quote (and I will give my objections regarding Dostoievski at the end) would not have made these remarks had it not been that the intellect in the West came to be understood in a completely distorted manner by those who were- apparently- its main supporters.

What all those anti-modern authors have in common is practically a re-action to the reducing of intellect to discursive thinking which, when systematized, becomes the illusion of rationalism.
So if it is this rationalism which Pascal says cannot grasp the deeper recesses of the heart, he is entirely correct. The same goes for Nietzsche in his demolation work against the banal couch-intellectual of his day.

Of course, if after correctly diagnosing the disease one proposed as a cure a sort of equally banal sentimentalism and the other a self-anihilating vitalism, that is another problem altogether.

The thing is that some time in the late Middle Ages, in the West, ” to know” was separated from “to see”. Knowledge became more and more to be understood as something entirely abstract and then all those kinds of artificial separations between faith and reason, knowledge and vision and so on.

Following this a separation was further introduced between mystical experience and “rational faith”. This caused the former to be little more than blind sentimentalism in many cases and the latter to be cold abstraction.
I always say that the concept of University is a telling symptom of this disease. Theology and philosophy became divorced from ascesis and prayer.
It is no surprise to hear in “theological” circles today that “X is an ascetic, a mystic etc., but he’s not a theologian”- meaning he is not specialized in academical theology. Such a statement would have been unthinkable before the dawn of the modern age.

So the reactions you point to are desperate attempts that try (many times in a wrong manner) to recover something that was lost- which is direct knowledge, direct experience of higher realities, which the rationalism of early modernity jettisoned.

Now, regarding Dostoievski, he experienced different stages in his journey and the Notes from the Underground cannot be in any way regarded as his final word on things, but quite the contrary. However, it is probably correct to say that the 2+2 statement seems to have accompanied him to the end of his days in one form or another.
Dostoievski certainly has been criticized for something that you point out here- namely that the starets Zosima from Br. Karamazov seems more like a deluded individual than a truly accomplished mystic (this criticism coming from an actual staretz from Optima, by the way). Yet, this itself depends on how one takes this. I would wholeheartedly agree that from one point onwards all “positive” laws must cease before the silent paradox. Think about the mystery of the Trinity- One and Three are certainly no ordinary arithmetic notions here. Or having two natures in one hypostasis- neither separated nor confused and so on. I remember a debate between a Christian and a perennialist from Schuon’s camp. The latter was insisting that one always is before three, therefore the Trinity is itself just an inferior aspect of the impersonal godhead.
So if I were to rephrase the 2+2=5 in this context, I would say that beyond the confines of the cosmos, one no longer comes before 3, nor is 3>1, but 1=3.

I will end with counter-challenge: I’ve recently read or heard about three monks in the 20th century, on mount Athos, who reached the highest peaks of spiritual experience. All three had minimal education before reaching the Holy Mountain – none was erudite, well-read or any use in an academic debate. Yet PHDs and all sorts of high ranking intellectuals from the world came to seek their advice.
The question is this: how come in the past you had people like St Paul, Basil of Cesareea, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustin of Hippo and so many other like them who displayed both erudition, high and refined culture and an experiential living out of the faith- men in which there was no split between discursive learning and mystical knowledge, while today these two categories never seem to meet?

My proposition is: in our times mind and heart have become so separated that we instinctively feel we must choose either the one and the other…

I’ll elaborate on this in upcoming article. For now, I’ll just point out that what is commonly considered as the some kind of desperate reaction seems to me suspiciously more like alternative development and wholehearted one for that matter. Taking Dostojevski for example, his political views, that were not merely spur of the moment thing but firm and public conviction, are in themselves not that modern and reactionary towards modernity. I’d say, Filotej’s declaration to Vasilije the Blind about the Third Rome was more influential there, coupled with Dostojevski’s quite modern propensity to doubt.

As for question, yes that’s what we have on the level of what is dominant in public. But who is so wise to answer, why?

Of course rejecting dry, cold, boring, heartless…etc. intellect in favor of “authenticity” of “heart” meaning mostly shallow sentimentalism is new-ageish rubbish, although having with very deep roots across societal spectrum.
But in order to rightly judge the intellect and its proper place we need to adopt idea that it is relatively recent invention among human capacities. To imagine that similar capacity pre-existed Greco-Roman culture is completely unfounded, same as asuming that we can understand/translate thought of Greco Roman period in our today’s intellectual terms. Even everything produced befroe 15th century is not easily translated, even less understood.
So we need to assume a certain arc across ages on which we encounter certain stages and metamorphosis of human existence.
If we call it evolution or involution is not important as both terms can be understood equally artificially and linear.
The point is we cannot project our condition in the past and in the future in abstract terms as most of parameters of our internal and external condition passes through quite dynamic transformations. We have indications in historical records but they need to be seen in correct light as artifacts that not necessarily reflect anything familiar to our present understandings.
Probably we cannot understand today what Plato or even Aristotle meant. We need special guidance and “translators” of such contents.
Hence, we need contemporary content and translation- if we seek or ask for one, we shall find it, if we knock, someone will open the door and handed over a latest update to us. However, choice to ignore it is solely on us.

It would not be surprising that the chief audience of this site, paucious as it may be, likely share a very common ground in terms of world views and general outlook on life. We all agree at some level, that human history was not one of progress, but in general one of decline (interspersed by occasional streams of light), and that the technological abundance of today is an illusion that veils the spiritual desolace of a penultimate era.

However, no comment section should be one of unequivocal concord, otherwise this would be something akin to inappropriate rubbing of skins. You have people with different levels of education and intelligence, and also different fields or areas of life, experience from which they could also draw different opinions.

I do find distasteful, as I made clear before, of arguing simply for the sake of argument, or trying to refute a position in favor of sheer obliviousness characteristic of prevailing thought. Yet there are times when I must break habit and give voice to my dissonant silence, not for the sake of argument, but to gain something valuable from it.

It is not the first time that I hear the notion of intellect placed at the center of ontological being, of humans foremost, and perhaps of that which lies at the grounds of nature itself. Ironically I have heard the same line of thought zealously dispensed to me by a Therevada Buddhist, for whom the mind apparently forms the essence of all that is. But is that really the case, and furthermore can this view truly be reconciled with the basis of religion and tradition?

For starters, what do we mean by intellect? One of its functions, its main distinguishing feature as far as human beings are concerned, is to cogitate that what is cogitable. Intellect shapes raw images produced by the mind into a designated form of thought; the two, like many things in nature, seem to have an ouroboric relationship, in the sense that one derives from, and in turn, gives rise to the other, just as conversely, it could be thought of slithering away from, and consuming it.

It is the same intellect which coalesced the increasing theosophic current of philosophy of late Antiquity into a philosophically grounded theology based on mystical revelation, and it is intellect which, 1500 years later, began to question the very foundations of its rational validity. It is intellect which liberates man from the darkness of superstition, just as it is intellect which erodes away any belief in a higher nature or ideal distinct from the brutal determinism of observed events.

Elements of the intellect, ideas which do not find adequate expression in human language must necessarily be cloaked and alluded to in abstruse terms construed around allegorical myths and axioms drawn from theological dogmas. Words, as Yukio Mishima observed, have this acidic property where they tend to erode the lineage of the meaning they express. That is why layers and layers of thought are placed before them to eat away so that the process itself can hint at a meaning entirely obscured from contextual flow, but can only be grasped by affinity. But it is precisely this scholastic abstruseness that drew the greatest intellects to easily shatter the essentially mystical and religious approach to reality that was expressed this way. That is why since early Modernity, noetic, or anagogical knowledge has been consigned to the realm of literature, and even then in perverted and inverted forms, as evident perhaps, in writers like de Sade and Bataille who attempt to express the deepest observations of human nature through absolute debasement of thought.

Now going back in the exact opposite direction, the notion that three make one is not a mathematical notion, it is not a cogitable notion, but it is quite frankly not a conceivable notion at all. It is not a three headed god, or a person with triple personalities, or an actor wearing three masks according to time of day, indeed anything that intellect can possibly tell us could be such and such as to make sense even in an abstract form. The expression of the Trinity (I refuse to call it an “idea”) is precisely to bar reaching an understanding with human reasoning. Because everyone who studies esoterics at any length knows that from the first day, cult was always exclusive. It was a great innovation by Christ to open to all that which was privy to a select few individuals whose conception of unfolding reality was not of the world we have grown to consider “our own”.

From these observations, it appears to me that intellect takes on a fundamentally temporal existence. I take on a bit of Castaneda here to suggest that intellect is not a property which we can be said to truly possess, but only as adjunct to processes to which we are subjected.

But it’s not needed to go that far. In fact we can use a single word. Women. Can it be said that they possess an intellect? If intellect forms the nature of a man apart from that of women, then why is that would be Hypatias throughout history were skinned with roof tiles, burned at the stake, smothered, immured, shot, hanged for daring to express inklings of what, AS IF only BELONGED to the domain of man’s ontological character? And yet if we consider a significant property of intellect as the capacity of conceiving the truth, in that case, we are hardly at a loss to name cases where women stood for it precisely at times when men’s minds were clouded by either madness or a special kind of cowardice peculiar to our gender. We can either conclude from this that woman either possesses intellect (which is self evidently absurd) or that her ontological reality exists apart from it. And is it then so distant to infer that the same applies for men as well, and that intellect is an ephemeral property and not the root basis of a genuine, living spirit?

In Slavic language such as Croatian, when someone throws back at you something what you said as self evident irony, he most likely implies that you see this also and he puts it forward like a mock insult to which he expects you to reply in kind, whereas unspoken assumption is that both of you are joking and you both know it. I know of Croats who got themselves detained by police in US for trying to speak to American officials like this. In English you can’t pull it off as naturally as in Croatian because language is too direct, whereas we are accustomed to relate meanings in allusions.

I was thinking do I put a smiley or not, it’s not funny if it’s too obvious. In the end I figured better safe than sorry. I mean the whole situation was so perfectly set up for that line, it would be a horrible shame to let it go to waste even if it means risking a woman’s wrath.

Well, for all you smart guys, remember intelligence, which is surely the foundation of intellect or the ability to understand/cogitate, is an inherited capacity, well endowed in some, but much less so in others, and it is one that is particularly dependent upon the mother’s genes, as thus far the dreaded scientists have only found intelligence conditioning genes on the X chromosome, of which we ladies have two.

The best predictor of intelligence in both sexes is the IQ of the mother. Yes, there is the evidence of the tails – more male genii – and I am very happy to accept that. In general I have personally found brilliant men to be more..um.. brilliant than brilliant women. Doesn’t bother me at all. Though this theory of the tails also means that for all the extra Nobel prize winners there are on average more idiots in the male line. You win some, you lose some 🙂

If women posssessing intellect is self evidently absurd then one can extrapolate from tnat thesis that anyone, male or female, possessing the ability to navel gaze is likewise absurd, as the capacity would have been bred out of the species a long time ago.

It’s interesting how that particular comment attracted attention, but not the one right before it. I try not to allow my chauvinism to show without an equal amount of self reflection.

In any case I should have said something like “women are rarely predisposed towards an intellectual existence”. But there is no comment edit function. Obviously if women did not possess a measure of it, relations between the sexes would be impossible. One can only fathom if such a conviction led the Greeks to justify their shota complex.

In any case I was noting in bemusement that it is perhaps the dryness of a man’s mind that puts the greatest obstacle in front of an empirically unverifiable arguments about reality as well as its essentially passive character in Western traditions at least. Of course I don’t limit the scope of what such “empirical verficiation” could entail to what Neill the Grass might term as the standard of verifiable truth.

As a matter of fact, I am working on an article, or more likely, series thereof, precisely addressing this problem. The thing with intellect is that, as all powers of human being, it is not to be observed in itself, but in its origin. Its high status in Antiquity was a matter of course, both for Church fathers and philosophers, yet with different understanding of nuances that make all the difference – chief among them, in my opinion, being Christian explicit personalization of it. Not that this was unheard of in Pagans: Aristotle is also quite explicit about it but he had never gotten around to explain precisely what he means.

The main point is that intellect is the nexus of visible and invisible accessible to everyone simply because the whole of the inner nature of human being is actualized by it. As such it has power to wreak havoc once it doesn’t understand itself properly and I would argue that, if we leave formalized terminology aside, this is also self evident because the proper expression would be he doesn’t understand himself properly.

My problem with modern notions of intellect is that they mostly understand it either as an empirical apparatus or syllogism machine a.k.a. “discursive reason”, which amounts to isolating it from its origin and it is quite illogical to claim one understands something if he at least doesn’t affirm the existence of its origin. Discursive reasoning is not machine like chaining of thoughts but expression of the ultimate human limit, i.e. temporality that sometimes can be infused with the power making it transcend its limits, but only for a specific reason that is not to be found in the intellect itself but precisely in that origin of his. This is the reason why I am always wary about the ambition to transcend the intellect – it always seems to be so intellectual, especially when it proclaims itself anti-intellectual.

The problem of intellect gone awry is, in my opinion, above all else the problem of freedom. We are so identified with our daily concerns that we forget that we posses the power of straying into thinking that everything is possible, precisely because we can conceive ourselves as creators of not only history, but world itself. This power comes from the fact that intellect is that higher imprint upon which everything else in human being is being informed and it can delude itself into seeing itself as its own origin and thus creator. I think that, when this happens, the idea of human based re-creation of the world comes as a natural consequence. As wrong as this is it is the condition of human dignity – a God given ability to cosmically screw up.

As for women, the ability to take a night flight riding a broomstick, hopefully after it was applied to less wanton ends in the service of the household, is one of those wonderful imprints demonstrating the limits of our understanding and calling man to humility before the transcendent origin of it. I mean, you just can figure out where’s the buzz in that.

I didn’t hasten to write a reply in the past several days due to the troubled facts of my life. I don’t want to give the impression that I only care for my own opinion. I do take your points into consideration, but I believe that a different approach would better serve to express these ideas, especially to those people who scoff at the notion of something they can’t directly conceive fitting into their abstract imaginary (motion) picture of daily existence.

The reason why I choose to press this point, and indeed critique, is precisely because the mind tends to orient itself as the center from which the truth and falsehood of observed (and non-observed) phenomena and abstract concepts are established. The mind of matter is the measure of all things, and consequently is its source in the physical human being. To accept this is seen as a great awakening in some people with an extremely superficial view of reality (and especially without a sense of how it is disclosed by history), without realizing this inhibits the possibility of experiencing the truths that require a certain effort to transcend, and not in some mumbo jumbo mystical sense, but in a very literal, direct, I should stress scientific fashion the boundaries of their world-conception through conscious effort. This is precisely the reason why the mind on its own tends to reject metaphysical or “hylomorphic” concepts that describe reality (because they are outside of what it can either directly project into, or become influenced by in a passive fashion), even though ironically that very same attitude contributes it’s detachment from being into the domain of absolute abstraction and even digitization. This is a problem that is faced by all of us without exception, although there are degrees of which we tend to come to terms with, and of course pathways which lead to certain auto-destruction as we can observe happening in the modern industrialized scientific society.

But perhaps it is better to continue this conversation in later updates, especially when there is a running theme to them.